Wednesday, 28 April 2010

We've seen myriad variations on the travel-planning theme, but when it comes right down to it, most options still fall into one of two categories: DIY options involving the web or purchased services from a paid planner. OfferMeaTrip, on the other hand, aims to combine the best of both worlds with a service in which consumers dictate what they want and agents bid for their business.

Users of London-based OfferMeaTrip begin by telling the service what kind of trip they'd like to take, including how much they want to spend over how long a time and what types of activities they enjoy. The company's network of approved travel agents—it accepts only those who are ABTA / TTA and/or ATOL registered—can then choose to make offers on a corresponding trip. Offers are presented in the form of tailored, personalized on-line holiday brochures thanks to the site's simple, online brochure creator. The consumer in question then chooses the offer that's most appealing to them, and OfferMeaTrip helps them connect with the agent for booking and payment confirmation. Using OfferMeaTrip is free for travellers; for agents, it's currently free as well through a special, pre-launch introductory offer.

Providing yet another excellent example of an intention-based service, OfferMeaTrip currently appears to focus primarily on UK travellers and agents. One to partner with or emulate in other parts of the world...?

Saturday, 24 April 2010

James Howard Kunstler (born in 1948, New York City, New York) is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He is best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere (1994), a history of American suburbia and urban development, and the more recent The Long Emergency (2005), where he argues that declining oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized society as we know it and force Americans to live in smaller-scale, localized, agrarian (or semi-agrarian) communities. He has written a science fiction novel conjecturing such a culture in the future, World Made by Hand in 2008. He also gives lectures on topics related to suburbia, urban development, and the challenges of what he calls "the global oil predicament" and a resultant change in the “American Way of Life.” He is also a leading proponent of the movement known as "New Urbanism."

Thursday, 22 April 2010

A wedding is one of the most important days of your life. It can also be one of the most expensive, running $28,000 on average, according to some estimates. For those who don't have that much, there's a new company out of Norwell, Mass., that could help: Wedding Payment Plan will finance your wedding. Scott Almeida, 35, says he got the idea from watching a family friend succeed at financing orthodontia and Lasik eye and cosmetic surgery.

“My first thought wasn't weddings; it was funerals,” he laughs. “But weddings are a lot more fun.” He wrote up a business plan as a nighttime MBA student at Babson College and began raising money from family and friends. He also tapped $100,000 from an account that he and nine former classmates had set up to back whoever came up with the best startup idea. In 2007, he left his day job as a venture capitalist to work full-time on Wedding Payment Plan.

The average loan runs about $10,000 with a fixed 9.9% interest rate paid back over five years. The company hasn't yet financed 500 weddings, but in the last year applications have jumped 333%. Almeida is raising $500,000 to go national and says the lending venture could turn profitable as early as mid-2010.

A crowd of 15 people sat around Nathanson as he explained how the inspiration for Bananagrams came after a two-hour-long Scrabble game with his grandson three or four years ago.

Frustrated with the length of time it took to play the game, Nathanson said “we need an anagram so fast it will drive you bananas.”

“After I said the words,” he said, “they all rolled together and then became a family project.”

The game consists of 144 letter tiles, which the players combine to form individual crosswords. Letters are continuously added to each player’s pile until the tiles run out. At this point, the first player to create a word-grid using all of their letters wins.

Although Nathanson has been making toys for his family his whole life, he never marketed them, he said.

“I do things when the time is right to do them,” he said.

The Bananagrams company is based in Rhode Island, although the game itself is produced overseas. Located at 845 Allens Ave. in Providence, Nathanson said he has tried to keep the business as local as possible.

“We tried having them made in Providence, but when we priced it out, the game would have to sell for $70 or $80 dollars,” Nathanson said.

Since Bananagrams was first released, Nathanson has created and sold two other word games: Appleletters, which is like Bananagrams but involves scoring, and Pairs of Pears, a simpler letter game for younger players.

At just over 80 years old, Nathanson has not lost his passion for games, especially those involving words.

“Letters become words, words become sentences and sentences become knowledge,” Nathanson says.

He has continued to invent games and is planning on releasing two new words games soon: Oh Spell and Zip-It. His style of game-making — boardless, scoreless, fast and fun — has not changed, he said.

Zip-It, Nathanson said, was developed to be played within an eight-square-inch area and “is almost as fast as rock, paper, scissors.” It involves 24 six-sided cubes and plays like a sped up version of Bananagrams, with players racing each other to complete ten word-grids first.

The simplicity and rapidity of Zip-It, says Nathanson, would make it a great drinking game for bars.

“I suspect that at bars it will start as Zip-It and wind up as Tip-It,” Nathanson said.His latest creation is based on the traditional card game “Oh Hell.” Nathanson’s version, Oh Spell, is a word-based card game that substitutes font patterns for suits.

“I don’t know why no one has thought of this before,” Nathanson said. “With numbers you are limited, but with words, creation is infinite.”

Bananagrams breaks the mold of most word games, which Nathanson described as “fixed.” Yet he is humble about his creation.

The concept “has been around for 200 years,” Nathanson said. “I just gave it a spin that would attract young people.”

Wednesday, 14 April 2010

SAN DIEGO (CNNMoney.com) -- Mario Batali decided last year to install a garden between his adjoining West Hollywood restaurants, Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza. But a plain old backyard patch wouldn't do. Batali wanted something more visually striking, something more ... vertical? So he turned to Jim Mumford, the owner of Good Earth Plant and Flower Company in San Diego.

Mumford, 52, had built a reputation as a nontraditional gardener. In March 2007, he embarked on a "giant experiment," replacing the 1,800-square-foot roof of a commercial building he owned with a planter's paradise: three inches of specialized, lightweight soil over a padded waterproofing and drainage system. Now, 46 varieties of plants thrive there, alongside footpaths and faux boulders.

When customers saw Mumford's urban oasis, they started asking him about rooftop vegetable gardens. He wanted to help them, but the idea wasn't practical.

"You would need to either harness yourself or build a 42-inch wall around the edge so you don't fall off while working there," he says. "Also a vegetable garden requires more soil and water, so now you have weight issues, too."

But building gardens on a wall -- now that was something Mumford could do.

And the timing was ripe, says Caron Golden, the culinary blogger behind San Diego Foodstuff.

"Most restaurants in urban spaces don't have the room for a big garden. But at the same time, there is this growing emphasis on eating what's grown locally," Golden says. "When you think of all the crawling plants that grow on walls, this is actually not as strange as it sounds."

Mumford now builds "edible walls" from modular boxes that look like shallow milk crates. Each box is two feet square and eight inches deep, with a fabric pouch of soil inside. To start a garden, he pushes small plants into the soil through slits in the fabric. After about eight weeks, the plants have filled out and anchored themselves. The crates are mounted onto a rack and fitted to the side of a building. Mumford charges about $50 a square foot for residential customers and between $150 to $200 a square foot for commercial ones.

Edible walls are a gamble for Good Earth, which took in just over $1 million in revenue last year. Unlike the handful of other U.S. garden companies trying similar projects, Mumford is working in an area of the country where water can be scarce. On top of that, the recession has slowed the pace of new construction. So far Mumford is getting more calls than clients, though interest from companies like Qualcomm, which hopes to put an edible wall in a new cafeteria several years from now, gives him hope that the idea will take off.

He's already scored one very satisfied customer: Mario Batali, whose wall spans 72 square feet and includes 324 plants, most of them herbs like mint, chicory, rosemary and sage. Mumford included beets, too, not for the vegetable itself but for the plants' lush green and purple leaves.

"It's all edible, all delicious and most significantly, all very beautiful," says Batali. "And it smells really good, too."

Tuesday, 6 April 2010

When Raymond Aker ran a cleaning business in San Diego, he was frustrated by how hard it was to find customers. Akers solution became his next business: BidMyCleaning.com, a Web site designed to connect clients with cleaners in a transaction as smooth as buying books on Amazon. Users select what type of cleaning they need, punch in their Zip Code, and BidMyCleaning spits out price quotes from vetted providers. Customers schedule online and pay through the site after service is provided. BidMyCleaning takes a cut of 20% to 30% on each bookingthe average sale is $130. Aker, 36, says he and three thirtysomething co-founders built the site in about six months with $100,000 raised from friends, family, and angels. The company, which now has four employees besides the founders, was profitable nine months after launching in April 2008, with $390,000 in revenue in the first year. Based in San Diego with a second team in Houston, BidMyCleaning is now seeking investors to expand to other services like lawn care or repairs.